Denis Rancourt is refusing to participate in a defamation trial in which he is accused of libelling Joanne St. Lewis, a University of Ottawa law professor, by suggesting in two postings on his blog in 2011 that she acted as a “house Negro”.

Judge Michel Charbonneau advised the six-member jury Friday that Rancourt, who is representing himself, had let the know court that “he would not continue to participate in this trial. So we will continue the trial in his absence.” Charbonneau offered the jury no explanation of Rancourt’s reasons for withdrawing from the proceedings, which had started Thursday.

But in an interview, Rancourt — a former physics professor who was fired by the University of Ottawa in 2009 — cited a “reasonable apprehension of bias” on Charbonneau’s part and the judge’s decision Thursday to disallow a key legal defence as reasons for his decision to boycott the trial.

“This is the only option I have that does not legitimize something this egregious,” said Rancourt, who likened the trial to proceedings in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era.

Before the trial began, Rancourt said he asked Charbonneau to recuse himself because he’s a University of Ottawa graduate and donates money to its scholarship funds, but the judge declined.

On the trial’s first day, Rancourt was explaining to the jury that one of his three legal arguments would be an “abuse of process” defence when Richard Dearden, St. Lewis’s lawyer, raised objections. Dearden has also acted as counsel for the Citizen for many years.

Though Rancourt cited a precedent for the abuse of process defence in Britain, Charbonneau told him it didn’t exist in Canadian courts and he could not raise it during the trial.

“To strike out a pleading is a Draconian measure,” Rancourt said, adding that the judge’s ruling effectively gutted his defence strategy and created “a fake process where I’m gagged.

“That, to me, is absurd. It’s insane,” he exclaimed. “It’s the opposite of what should happen in a fair process. I’m not going to participate in that kind of kangaroo court.”

Rancourt acknowledged that his absence will put the jury in a “very difficult position” when it has to decide whether he defamed St. Lewis, who is claiming $1 million in damages. “This poor jury is not going to hear the whole story.”

But he said he would not reconsider his decision to withdraw from the trial. Asked what he will do if the jury finds in St. Lewis’s favour, he replied: “I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

Meanwhile, in Rancourt’s absence, St. Lewis testified Friday about her evaluation of a 2008 report by the university’s Student Appeal Centre (SAC) that found there was systemic racism in the processes the university uses to deal with alleged academic fraud by students.

It was that evaluation, which found serious methodological problems with the report, along with emails later released under freedom of information laws, that prompted Rancourt to refer to St. Lewis as he did.

Rancourt made the allegation even though Mireille Gervais, then SAC’s director, later wrote that St. Lewis’s recommendations — including that the university conduct an independent review to determine whether racism played any role in its academic fraud process — echoed those in the report.

St. Lewis testified that she had no contact with university president Allan Rock while she was writing her evaluation. Nor did she read any of the emails between Rock and other university officials about the issue until she started her litigation against Rancourt in 2011, she said.

In one email, Rock raised concerns about St. Lewis’s recommendation for an independent review. St. Lewis said that when she finally read the email years later, “it was news to me that he had that concern.”